IT Playground

Welcome to my technology playground.

When weather does not inspire me for outdoor activities, I enjoy diving into various IT topics to gain and maintain the knowledge I keep teaching in school. Basically, I'm fascinated and attracted by Open-Source IT softwares or standards like

1. Linux

2. Python, JS

3. MySQL/MariaDB

4. Arduino

Since my time in university, I've been fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Back then, we'd learned how to recognice handwritten digits. Today, I'm intrigued by the scientific achivements made available by AI frameworks like TensorFlow.

I suppose many software projects would better meet user needs if they were open source for three reasons:

1. as a user, I have the freedom to customize and improve the software as I wish. This could actually encourage more people to learn programming.

2. as a user or organization, I can check the source for malicious or unwanted parts (like trackers, spyware etc.)

3. by buying or ordering only open source products, my organisation has the freedom to adapt the software to meet actual needs.

Saying this, I am well aware that open source software does cost money (or at least a lot of time) to develop, test and distribute.

As years go by, technologies progress and design preferences change. In April 2013 I migrated the "www.cyclocross-store.de" from an ancient version of xt:Commerce to the recent xt:Commerce 4.0. The main concern was compatibility of shop and customer data. A configuration tool for custom bicycles was implemented as well as an advisor tool for narrowing the search of wheelsets depending on usage, body weight and other features. Only minor changes where applied to the default template.

By April 2014, the shop template was reworked featuring a modern frontpage layout. Work is in progress to create a blog plugin and backend newsletter administration tool. This is an excellent opportunity to dig into CSS, PHP and JavaScript.

Subcategories

Since my studies, I am fascinated by simulation and computing algorithms inspired by nature. Be it ant colony optimization for fleet routing, be it genetic algorithms for optimizing high dimensional paramterization problems, with my research company Green-ORCA I can tackle it.

Back in 1996 I started learning HTML and CSS. The internet bandwidth was still so slow that one thought twice what size of pictures to upload, and interactivity was mainly achived with simple forms. Times have changed, and the once mainly static world wide web turned into a giant market place and communication platform.

And here we are - JS-based server-side frameworks (like Meteor) with extensive code generators for client and server-side make full-stack development extremely productive, and perhaps sooner or later replace the classic server-side and client-side code mess.

However, for the time being this page is mainly a technical playground for me, based on Joomla and a few PHP and JS snippets of my own.